Contents

Teenage Superstars charts a generation of musicians from Glasgow and Lanarkshire from 1982. Broadly speaking, it is chronologically structured, while also tracing the geographical and social connections between some of the bands (for example, the childhood friendship of Sean Dickson, Duglas T. Stewart and Norman Blake, all from Bellshill). The film's story follows the formation of the featured bands, the friendships between them and sharing of band members, the commercial success of The Soup Dragons, Primal Scream and Teenage Fanclub, and the bond between the Scottish and US indie scenes of the early 1990s before the scene they had created gave way to Britpop.

McPhee had originally planned to make a single film - titled The Sound of Young Scotland - about Postcard Records and The Fire Engines, but as production continued, found that "a fuller story was beginning to emerge," and that the story of the Glaswegian scene from 1982, while a continuation of Big Gold Dream, was a story in its own right "which warranted a film in itself."[1]